The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “Oh, and that cult of Holy Saint Somebody who lived in the wilderness and ate bugs. Some left-wing Greek Orthodox priest was plotting to sell the saint’s bones to a dealer in Manhattan and funnel the proceeds to the KGB. An elaborate money-laundering scheme stinking of frankincense and myrrh. Warren blew it wide open.”

  “Really? I can’t imagine.” But I could imagine, all too well, the younger Warren thinking this sounded like fun, a ballsy creative adventure.

  “Stop saying really. It’s real.” Preston transferred his cane to his left hand and held up his right, two fingers hooked forward. “Scout’s honor.”

  Again he sounded like Warren. Was he imitating him or speaking in the voice of their common background?

  “Do you know Warren’s favorite thing? Naming covert programs, assassinations, and coups. According to Warren, the Agency has on its payroll some highly educated, wickedly humorous fellows who always get his literary jokes. Operation Garden Snake. Operation Steppenwolf, not one of his proudest moments. How unfortunate that the research subject decided to throw himself from a fifteenth-story hotel window. How inept of the Agency not to book the guy on a lower floor. Sometimes Warren made up the name first and then the operation. Operation Ahab. What reader of Moby-Dick would go on that mission? Five hundred soldiers parachuted into Rumania. When they disappeared without a trace, five hundred more were dropped.”

  Was my uncle Mort among them? All that remained of him was our familial fear of the Parachute Jump and a framed photograph of a guy who looked like a younger, thinner Dad. No wonder Uncle Maddie hated Communists. Could Warren have been responsible for my uncle’s death?

  I reminded myself that Preston wasn’t testifying under oath. He was raving in a darkened room in a mental asylum.

  “These guys are trained to keep secrets. Take the bullet. Eat the cyanide. Torture them fucking senseless, they won’t talk. But not my man Warren. After three martinis, he’s Mr. Blah Blah Blah. Señor Boca Grande. He’ll tell you everything he knows, plus a lot he doesn’t know, plus a lot he wishes he knew. And no one cares. Someone up there likes him. He keeps his spymaster status. He retrieves some floating turd from a writer’s toilet, gives it a sexy title, and offers it to the government as a propaganda bomb. The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic. By the gorgeous, gifted debut novelist Anya Partridge. Seriously? Are you kidding? It’s the CIA’s three-hundred-page wet dream.”

  “Can you prove this? Any of this?”

  “Why should I? I don’t have to. Either Warren is lying, or I’m lying, or everybody’s lying. You’re probably lying about something. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t. So you’re just going to have to work this out on your own.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What was that?”

  “Sorry. I was talking to myself.”

  “You’ve come to the right place for that, ha-ha.”

  Preston laughed like the madman he was. I laughed like a maniac too. My eyeballs jittered in their sockets. I thought of Lucy, terrified that Ricky was plotting to kill her.

  Logic required an effort that I was willing to make. “I can’t believe the Agency would retain a guy who can’t keep his mouth shut when he drinks.”

  “Oh, really? End-stage alcoholism is the number one job qualification on a prospective agent’s CV. You’ve heard of the two-martini lunch? How about the six-martini lunch—and then it’s back to spreading democracy around the world.”

  I was shocked, less by what Preston was saying than by how sane he sounded.

  “Do you know what Warren wanted to call his mind-control project? Operation Svengali. Too bad that the suits in Washington decided it was too obvious. What’s the point of a secret name if everyone knows what it means? What a brain! If Warren wasn’t in publishing, he could rule the world!”

  Was Preston mocking or admiring? It was hard to tell. Politics and morality were so thickly mixed with animosity and grievance, betrayal and personal loss. What if they’d locked up the wrong guy, and it was Warren who should have been hospitalized, not Preston? Was there anything Warren hadn’t done when he wasn’t busy running one of the country’s most distinguished publishing houses? Or was Preston out of his mind?

  Preston seemed to have lost all fear that his wheelchair might be bugged. “There was this Malaysian writer whom Warren promised to publish. He lured him to a hotel bar in Singapore where the guy was arrested by the secret police. An Iranian journalist left a New York book party with Warren and hasn’t been heard from since. And that sexy Czech novel with that idiotic title . . . The Smile of Disillusion?”

  I hadn’t read the book, but I’d seen it in a display case at the office.

  “Warren published it against its author’s will. The writer begged him not to bring it out in the West. His freedom, his family, his life would be in danger. Warren told him not to be a pussy. Sure enough, the book comes out, sells five copies. The writer’s fired from his university job and has to work as a window cleaner. Know what Warren said? ‘Why the hell did the guy give me the book if he didn’t want it published?’ That’s your Mr. Good Guy! That’s your lover of world literature! That’s your . . . Mr. CIA Agent! Even that unfortunate woman, that sub-sub-minor poet who adopted the Japanese kid with the messed-up face—”

  “Florence Durgin.” Just saying her name felt like testifying to the truth of what Preston was alleging.

  “Poor thing. She knew about some dirty deal in postwar Japan. Some covert yakuza business. The Japanese kid told her a secret that the Agency didn’t want known. Florence threatened to go public. Warren agreed to print two volumes of iambic pentameter teardrops and snot that no one will ever read.”

  “I wouldn’t say no one.” I was insulted on Florence’s behalf. Her first book hadn’t sold outstandingly well, but it had done better than expected.

  “Okay, you’re right. No one but the typesetter. And maybe the editor. Maybe. A deal was struck. No wonder she’s a disaster. Warren didn’t bother hiding what he wanted from her.”

  “Which was?”

  “Her silence. We printed a couple hundred copies and wrote it off as a tax deduction. It’s one of the cheaper prices that’s ever been paid for silence. Bargain basement, really.”

  My impression was that Warren had edited Florence’s first book. Preston didn’t seem to know that I was working on her new collection. Probably no one thought it worth mentioning.

  I said, “Her second book hasn’t come out yet.”

  “It will. Eventually. Trust me.”

  Did I trust him? So much he’d said seemed far-fetched, yet so much else seemed plausible.

  “Warren’s most catastrophic fuckup involved some unfortunate Albanians.”

  “Albanians?”

  “You know where Albania is, don’t you, son?”

  Albania was one of Professor Crowley’s special places. He’d spent years in High Albania, transcribing the fireside tales of the sworn virgins. One of the stories popped into my head. Scorned by a famous beauty, a man takes his revenge by serving the beauty a fruit that makes horns grow all over her face. Strangely, the memory, or maybe just the momentary distraction, soothed me.

  “Eighty-seven Albanians. All dead.” Preston slashed a bony finger across his throat.

  “All dead,” I repeated.

  “Eighty-seven dead Albanians. Is that not clear? Warren assembled a ragtag band of anti-Soviet resistance fighters. Women who fought with the partisans. Tough broads who dressed like men. He’d heard about them in some college class, and he’d gone there to find them.”

  “In what class?” I asked, though I knew.

  “Who the hell cares what class?” Preston said. “Warren told them they had reinforcements all over Eastern Europe. Lie number one. He promised that American soldiers would back them up if the going got rough. Big lie number two.

  “Pursued by Soviet agents, the Albanians holed up in a barn outside Berat. Safe in Athens, Warren tried to wire for help, but the wire service was down, so he
went out for dinner. A marvelous little ouzeri, is how that bastard tells the story.

  “The Soviets torched the barn, killing all the partisans trapped inside. And because the project died before it was officially born, Warren named it posthumously. The Burning.”

  The room had grown cold. Colder than before.

  “The Burning,” I said.

  “The Burning,” said Preston.

  “That was the title of my thesis, my senior year at college.”

  “Coincidence.” Preston shrugged. “‘The’ and ‘burning.’ Two common words.”

  “And, according to Warren, The Burning was The Vixen’s original title.”

  “Not so coincidental. I assume that Warren knew about your paper. He has an appetite for pointless trivia and elaborate private jokes that put people on edge.”

  Elaborate private jokes. The image of Anya and her fake black eye flashed past me—and vanished.

  “Except for his friends in the Agency, or so he claims, no one thinks his jokes are funny, not even the girls he’s fucking. Anya, Elaine, that poor sweet Julia who used to come and see me before Warren tired of her and . . . How did I get off on that?”

  “Before Warren tired of her and what?”

  Preston said, “How should I know? Why are you even asking?”

  I was paralyzed. Mute. How much did Warren know about me? There was so little to know. I looked up at the ceiling, the corners hairy with spiderwebs. Searching for . . . what? Microphones, cameras? I was as bad as McCarthy seeing commies under every bed. This way paranoia lay. That way led to the truth. The directional sign had spun around and kept turning and turning.

  Let this all be a madman’s fantasy, and my life could go on like before. I was a fool to have visited Preston, to have come here in search of Anya. I should have coped with her disappearance without shredding the fragile calm of a mental patient. If what Preston said about Warren was even partly true, how could I continue working for him? And if Preston was lying, shouldn’t Warren know what his partner was saying about him? I wondered if Preston told Anya what he was telling me, if her knowing what he’d said about Warren had something to do with her disappearance.

  “Is that why you and Warren had that fight? At the office Christmas party?”

  “God, no. I already knew all that stuff. I’d decided to make my peace with it. Warren is a charismatic guy, in case you haven’t noticed. Not just capable but brilliant. His taste in books is stellar. His instinct is razor-sharp. People want to be around him. People want him to like and respect them.”

  I nodded, against my will. That was what I’d wanted.

  “It was thrilling at the beginning, when Warren and I were working to publish the best books by the best writers on the planet. Then everything changed, and I watched it change. I watched it slip out of my control. There was nothing I could do. No way to stop it. It was only when he invited his loutish, incompetent, wicked, deeply stupid spy-boy buddies to more or less run the company that we’d worked so hard to build—that’s when I drew the line. I didn’t believe we should be working for them. I hadn’t planned on that line running through a bookcase that turned out not to be fixed to the wall.

  “Cheap bookcase. Low-wattage bulbs. With all the CIA interest in the books Warren publishes, you’d think they’d spring for new carpet or decent lighting, let alone salaries and rent. But in my experience you don’t go into the espionage business unless you’re a bit of a sadist, and that sadistic need for control trickles all the way down the food chain. Some bigger fish than Warren must have enjoyed watching him sweat as soon as my rivers of money began to dry up. The Agency could float the firm, but someone wants to make Warren suffer. And of course he’s made a few costly mistakes for which they might want to make him pay. So you do see how The Vixen fits into the larger scheme, doubling as cash cow and propaganda bonanza?”

  Preston couldn’t have sounded saner. Maybe he wasn’t demented. My view of him had shifted back and forth from incarcerated lunatic to silenced truth-teller.

  “Meanwhile they brought me here and subjected me to . . . medical treatments.”

  “That’s torture!”

  Preston shrugged. “The drugs are excellent. Tip-top. Pharmaceutical grade. The staff enjoy their work. Nice women, one and all. The electroshock was unpleasant. I miss the coffee maker at work, the books, the secretaries, but—”

  “Electroshock? Someone needs to be told!”

  “I would strongly advise you not to. I suggest you not tell anyone that we had this conversation. They don’t like people talking. Anyway, I’m not complaining. I feel quite pacified. At peace. I was never going to win my fight to keep the spies out of the firm.

  “Life is simpler here. I can stay high as a kite! I always have someone to take me out when the walls start closing in. I like being wheeled into my former office like some crippled show pony—it’s better than working there, knowing what I know. It’s only when something disturbs my peace of mind and reminds me . . .”

  There it was. I knew it. I’d disturbed Preston’s peace of mind. I’d reminded him of what he’d lost. Sorry, sorry, sorry. And all because of a woman. The Vikings got that one right.

  “You can do whatever you want with this information. It no longer matters to me. Monks meditate in mountain huts for years looking for the peace of mind I’ve found here. No sitting on the cold, cold ground in the Himalayan snow for this geriatric lone-wolf Buddha. If I were you, I’d act as if all this never happened.”

  Preston didn’t sound like a man who’d found peace of mind but like a man whose heart had been broken. It wasn’t my place to tell him that and perhaps undo whatever good the medical staff had done.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I need to think.”

  “That sounds like a plan. I assume you can show yourself out. It’s very simple. You open that door and leave. You’ll forgive me if I don’t go along to chat up the on-duty nurses. The instant you walk out, they will inform the authorities that you were here and for how long. Someone will transcribe the conversation that my wheelchair has transmitted, and the document will go into the files they are compiling against us.”

  Preston’s paranoia was reassuring. The needle that had been tipping between belief and disbelief tipped back toward the conclusion that he was mad.

  My hand was on the doorknob when I said, “One more thing . . . if you see Anya, could you please tell her to get in touch? No matter where she is, no matter—”

  “I don’t think I’ll see Anya again,” Preston said. “I don’t think you will, either.”

  Preston spun his wheelchair around. His time with me was over.

  * * *

  I don’t remember if I thanked him or said goodbye. I remember thanking the nurses at the front desk, the younger and the older one, kindly and kindlier, both white, blond, dressed in white, as if they’d been dusted with flour, waiting to be fried. I watched the nurses change and change again from sweet-tempered health professionals to snarling prison guards. Could they have been listening to a transmission from Preston’s wheelchair? They were nurses, not spies. I’d caught Preston’s illness. If Warren intended to sow a plague, so did his former partner.

  I felt weirdly compelled to prove that I was a visitor and not a potential escapee or inmate. Of course I was upset. But even later in life, whenever I was introduced to psychiatrists, therapists, even survivors of breakdowns, I’d watch myself working to convince them that I was sane, like a drunk driver walking the white line for the police.

  I said, “Someone might want to check on Mr. Bartlett.”

  “We do check on him,” she said. “Every hour. Not when he has visitors. We trust them. Should we not?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You should. Could you tell me the best way to get back to the city.”

  “Would you like us to call you a cab?”

  I saw myself hustled into an unmarked car. I could almost feel the rough hand pushing down my head, shoving me into the back seat.
/>   “No thanks,” I said. “That’s all right.”

  I must have walked to the station. I must have taken the train to the city. I must have made my way back to my apartment. I must have heard the roaches welcoming me home.

  Though it was still afternoon, I fell asleep and had violent, chaotic dreams that I forgot upon awakening.

  I called in sick, the second day in a row. A terrible flu, etcetera. I didn’t want to infect the office. As if anyone cared. I couldn’t face my colleagues. Was Elaine part of this too? Was she involved in whatever plot Warren had contrived? Was I wrong to tell Elaine that Anya denied writing the novel? Is that why Anya was taken away?

  I showered and dressed. I sat on the edge of my bed. I let time pass. I tried to steady my heart rate, my breathing. I considered calling my parents. I thought about calling a doctor.

  Then I found my address book and telephoned Florence Durgin.

  Chapter 12

  I invited Florence to lunch. I was sorry I had no news to report about the publication of Autumn Light, but I thought it might be quite lovely to have a chat over a proper meal. I had never in my life said quite lovely or a proper meal. I was finally turning into Warren just when I least wanted to become him. I said that since Florence’s book was forthcoming, though not on this season’s list, she might want to make a few changes. I would have said anything to persuade her to see me, even though I sensed that Florence wouldn’t require much persuasion.

  In the silence during which Florence pretended to consult her schedule, I reminded myself to be compassionate, generous, and patient, even as I lied about why I wanted to see her.

  We were in luck. She’d had a last-minute cancellation. We arranged to meet the next day, at Amir’s Turkish Café, on Lexington and 27th. It was near my apartment, and I thought I might be able to afford it. I could tell she was disappointed that I hadn’t suggested one of the midtown spots where famous writers and publishers met for legendary lunches. Her ingratitude wouldn’t have annoyed me so intensely if I also didn’t wish we were going to a fancier place. Sharing this jealous resentment inspired a low-boiling fury that made me insist—to Florence and to myself—that Amir’s was better than wherever the Warrens, the Elaines, and the Uncle Maddies of the world were eating lunch.